Digital photography is a form of photography that uses an image sensor formed out of an array of photosensitive pixels to capture images of a scene. As opposed to film photography, which exposes light sensitive film, digital photography renders images using the photosensitive pixels to convert light photons into accumulated charge. Typically each pixel in the array is photosensitive to a certain range of light corresponding to one of the primary color components used by the image sensor to represent color. An infrared cutoff filter and one or more color filter layers are commonly overlaid on the image sensor pixel array to achieve selective pixel photosensitivity.
An image processor linked to the image sensor then typically determines corresponding intensities of each raw color component (e.g., red, green and blue) by measuring the amount of accumulated charge in each type of pixel. In some cases, the raw color components are also de-mosaiced to generate full color pixel representations. Accordingly, pixels in the resulting digital image are represented by a plurality of color component values, which may be red, green and blue color components, although other digital color representations exist as well.
A digital camera is typically equipped with a camera flash module or sub-unit. In conditions of low ambient light or scene illumination, the camera flash module emits a flash of artificially generated light during image capture. Together with the available ambient light, the flash light emitted from the camera flash module increases overall scene illumination to allow for brighter images.